Okay, so. I MEANT to wait for TOMORROW to post this, but in my exuberance at having actually finished a piece of art I’MMA POST AN EARLY VALENTINE’S DAY PICTURE COZ WHY NOT? (My sisters told me to. I don’t finish art often. I’m kinda proud of myself.) This is also going to count as a #Fanbruary contribution for me, on account of it being my way of saying that I’m a fan of @marykatewiles and @seanpersaud.

So what I did here was take one of Mary Kate’s lovely selfies from her Instagram, digitally rotoscoped (fancy word for traced) it, and then colored the thing in the GIMP. (I rather enjoy playing with this style.) Happy mushy feelings everyone! Eat chocolate and watch some Poe Party or something!

you will eventually hit a point where you start to feel icky inside if you go too long without eating some sort of vegetables

depending on your current level of athleticism/physical activity as well as the kind of activities you did as a kid/teenager, your joints may start acting whack in your twenties, despite what everyone says about that not happening until middle age

eventually you will reach a point where you wonder how you were able to stay up until 3am nearly every night and be perfectly fine the next day (and this moment will come much younger than you expect)

it is much harder to meet new people after you’re done with school than sitcoms would have you believe

don’t let society tell you shit: it is perfectly acceptable to live with your parents after you graduate, there’s no need to be broke and miserable just so you can have some misguided attempt at independence straight out of school

me watching monsters inc as a kid: how did it take so long for anyone to figure out that human child laughter not only produced energy like screams, but was more effective, and that children aren’t actually dangerous at all?

me watching monsters inc now: monsters incorporated, a multi-billion dollar corporate giant, stood to make extra profits off a scream shortage because low supply with high demand makes it possible to charge a fortune for a necessary commodity and everyone has no choice but to pay the high prices because they can’t go without electricity. Therefore Monsters Inc, as well as any other major powers that may have existed at the start of the era of using scream energy, fabricated the idea that only screams could generate sustainable energy sources in order to create artificial scarcity, because laugh energy was far easier to obtain and far more efficient, and therefore stood to lower the value of energy due to surplus. They also fabricated the idea that human children were toxic, in order to a) make other monsters too afraid to go near them to do research and possibly discover the secret of laugh energy, and b) to make monsters so afraid of going near them that there is a shortage of scarers, making it harder for rival companies to rise up and create competition. Even in the monster world, capitalism is based on lies, greed and cruelty, and even monster companies have no qualms about using and abusing children to maximize profits.

Political scientist and sf fan Henry Farrell (previously)
argues persuasively that the dystopian elements of our everyday life
are best viewed through the lens of Philip K Dick (whose books
repeatedly depicted a world of constructed realities, whose true nature
was obscured by totalitarians, conspiracies, and broken computers) and
not Orwell or Huxley, whose computers and systems worked altogether too
well to be good parallels for today’s janky dystopia.

In the PKDverse, it’s increasingly hard to tell bots from humans (and
even the bots might struggle to tell whether they are or are not
artificial), and “centaurs” (human-machine collaborations) poison our
mediasphere with software agents
that periodically get puppeted by real-life trolls. These centaurs use
captured bits of human intelligence – Wikipedia scrapes, messages
harvested from social media – to impersonate humans when no human is
available to puppet them, but then summon human assistance when they
reach a crux that’s above their paygrade – a moment of truth when it is
possible to effect an epic troll, or complete the next phase of a giant
con.

So, if you’ve followed me for a while you know I get really into the bird thing late in the year when the Christmas Count comes around. This past year I got super into it, helping Rob (the founder of our local Christmas Count) organize things, which mostly meant letting him do the hard work of contacting everyone and lining up participants while I did the fun part: scouting (i.e., birdwatching).

We were in the home stretch when a slight hiccup occurred: The Thomas Fire. It burned through the majority of our count circle, forced evacuations of large parts of the Carpinteria Valley, and kept those who stayed behind indoors due to the horrible air quality. We basically had no choice but to postpone the count to Friday, January 5, the last day of the count window.

By the time the rescheduled count rolled around the fire was contained and people were getting their lives back together. The firefighters had done a great job, keeping the fire mostly out of the human-inhabited coastal strip. But inland it had burned unchecked.

We normally work hard to get a team to Jameson Lake, a freshwater reservoir in the northern part of our circle. It’s hard to reach even in the best of times, but it’s worth it; there are birds there we just can’t get on the coast. But this year it was completely inaccessible; no one was being allowed in except firefighters and Forest Service personnel.

Then we got a break: Alan, the dam caretaker at Jameson Lake for the Montecito Water District, is a birder. He’d arranged for us to go in back in November, before the fire, for a scouting visit. Now he’d started going back in for damage assessment, and he scheduled ones of his visits for count day. Even better, he pulled some strings and got permission for a carload of us to go in with him.

So it was that I, along with two other volunteers (Deborah and Taylor, aka @quickthreebeers) got to spend count day out of cellphone range, exploring a burned-out landscape that was eerily silent: no other people, and very few birds.

For the most part it wasn’t great birding. But it was a fascinating look at the aftermath of the fire. And in terms of the citizen-science mission of the Christmas Count, it was a wonderful opportunity to gather data on which birds were there (ducks, woodpeckers, and SO many Dark-eyed Juncoes) and which were gone. I’m really looking forward to going back over the next few years to see the area come back to life.

As I mentioned, we were out of cellphone range all day, so it was only after making the three-hour trip back at the end of the day that I was able to touch base with Rob, and get the good news about the overall count: It went great. We got 155 species, just 3 short of our all-time record.